I was putting money on the model being Dorothy. To really blow Joyce’s mind about her sexuality. xD
deliverything
Well, she’s been helping Joyce with everything else about this life drawing class, so why not this too?
Morleuca
I was thinking maybe the originally planned model doesn’t show up and the professor presses Joe into service. Who is so non-plussed he ends up going along with it. Joyce’s head might explode however.
She had to do a quick glance around the room and brace herself in case her grandmother jumped out from somewhere and went “A-HA!” the moment she said sex.
Yes, that’s a little extreme even for Joyce, but she was half expecting Chris Hansen last strip.
Which one – Joyce saying “I’ve taken gender studies – I’m liberal now” or Joe’s remark about “a smoking crater of second-hand embarrassment”? Either one would be great!
i don’t want to start listing genders because if we start listing them then we’re gonna be here all day talking about them, drawing diagrams with straws
They weren’t listing genders, they were listing sexes, you can have a male form, a female form, or both, the currently acceptable term for having both is intersex, it used to be hermaphrodite, if you’re familiar with that, but apparently that’s offensive now? I don’t know why, since when I found out the individual who took it upon themselves to explain decided to be condescending instead of helpful.
There are also rare people with no sex at all. No repro organs, no interest, no evident gender. People seem to oscillate at random between male and female pronouns when speaking of them. I don’t know what they’re called.
Feathers
Asexu– wait no
Feathers
(This isn’t intended to be poking fun at ace people, I’m ace; it’s just poking fun at the English language I guess)
BarerMender
I would guess “sexless.”
Subjektivity
As far as I’ve currently seen studying medicine, I don’t think complete absence of sex characteristics is possible. when I searched through the NIH database for conditions associated with the absence of sex characteristics, I couldn’t find whatever condition you are referencing. Any idea what it’s called?
BarerMender
There was a person interviewed on TV some years ago who had no sex characteristics. The person was named Toby. They said they had folds like a woman but no vagina and no internal generative organs. That’s all I know.
Hell of a quote here: “I did not choose to exist. Finding that I exist, I determined it’s a good thing that I exist. I like being who I am. Why should I try to be anybody else?”
Subjektivity
Ah cool…. sounds like MRKH syndrome. Granted I don’t watch talkshows… but tonally that sounded more like an interview. Was that really just a daytime talk show?
“sex” is a combination of what genitals you got between your legs, what chromosomes you got, and what your hormones are doing. many people with penises get one set of chromosomes and hormones and are generally regarded as having a “male” sex. many people with vaginas get one set of chromosomes and hormones and are generally regarded as having a “female” sex. if you’re intersex, you don’t have both, you have some sort of combination of hormones, chromosomes, and genitals that are considered atypical, and there are dozens upon hundreds of ways that can manifest. a lotta times you end up with a between-the-legs genital that doesn’t quite conform to what a penis or a vagina typically looks like. we don’t use “hermaphrodite” anymore because that means you have a functioning penis and a functioning vagina, which–last i checked–medical consensus says isn’t a thing that happens to human beings, even intersex ones
what all this means is “sex” is kind of an incoherent way to talk about people. folks you might presume are male might have some slight factor off from the norm, same with folks you might presume are female. bodies can look lots of different ways, and you can’t actually tell just by looking the sum total of a person’s anatomy. so, like, why use it?
and i guess the answer is, as per my joke: there are a fuckton of genders. (gender might actually be biological! everything you think and feel about yourself is a sum total of hormones and chemicals and your brain meats, why should gender be any different?) it’s hard to list all of them. it’s easy to fall back to “sex”, which at a glance seems much easier to reduce to a neat little pile, but is actually, as i’ve explained, messy and complicated
i hope this helped
Yotomoe
It’s probably rude to say but I feel like this is moreso an issue depending on how charitable the listener is willing to be to the speaker. Like if you’re using the terminology for simplicity’s sake you can usually say “ok I get what they mean by this without requiring them to be incredibly specific about what they’re talking about” Because Sex is nebulous, Gender is literally impossible to understand without asking someone and they might not even know. And then you run the risk of spending whatever time you were gonna spend saying what you were gonna say to now trying to define what EXACTLY you mean and it just sorta makes the conversation switch subjects.
I dunno. I’m receptive but at the same time I do find it a little frustrating to have to broach any topic of the human body super carefully because my ape brain is designed to want to categorize things while socially we want to make so many categories to refer to being that it’s impossible to do the former easily.
deliverything
To add to this: the current strip depicts Hyde, Joe and Joyce. Just by looking, most people would assume Joyce is female while the other two are male. But… we can’t see their hormones, their chromosomes or their genitals (without looking on Slipshine, at least). Granted, there are some aspects we can see which are usually indicative, but they’re not always reliable.
eh, whatever
Two of them have beards, so that tells us something about their current hormone levels – whether self-produced or taken as medicine. That’s probably all, though.
Sterling
Not necessarily! As a recent (as in sub 1 yr) hrt patient, I can confirm that despite having low t and a nice high intake of e, not only could I still eventually grow a beard but if I had gone without shaving since beginning hormones the facial hair I had beforehand would not have thinned much. You can have female hormone levels and a beard. Most cis women shave their faces as well, btw.
Taffy
So, do most cis women just also lie about not shaving their faces, then? Because I’ve never met one who’s brought it up even once, even during conversations where it would be relevant. Usually they’ll just say something to the tune of “I’m glad I don’t need to do that”. I just wanna know where you’re getting “most” from.
It’s not DAILY, but sometimes my peach fuzz is just thick enough I have to get rid of it
People with light hair may be able to have exactly the same amount and not have it be visible except up close
Liquid Len
AFAIK, there are a few ways cis women deal with facial hair, usually by plucking, shaving, or bleaching. Kinda depends on how dark and thick the hair is. Hormone levels (think menopause) can alter this as well over a lifetime.
Taffy
Oh, I know about all those things (I’m not completely ignorant and oblivious to life, after all), I’m just raising an eyebrow at the use of “most”, when that goes against my own lived experience of cis women basically bragging that they don’t need to worry about face fuzz aside from the occasional eyebrow plucking. Not saying it never happens.
thejeff
I think it’s more common with age. It’s also very much dependent on ethnicity.
Might be very common in some areas and rare in others due to that.
Joy
It’s possible that they’re… Lying…?
Taffy
Like, I guess? But I try to steer clear of that whole “women are constantly lying” misogyny trope, so I’ll usually default to just believing what I’m told and assuming the person talking is being truthful. That said, I do understand that there’s about a billion societal bullshitteries that would maybe motivate that sort of lie.
Sterling
Well, I suppose to say that most shave is not provably correct- but an amount of very light/fine hair on the upper lip to chin region is something you can probably find if you are simply close up enough to a woman to see. It is something that some ladies will conceal due to social pressure, and tbh I would say is rude to ask about or mention in the same way it is rude to ask about or mention a trans woman’s facial hairs. I first noticed it on my mother as a child and have consistently noticed it on cisfem sexual and romantic partners throughout my life. Not universally, but often enough to make my trans ass feel way less dysphoric about having hair in general.
Twitcher
My sister gets lip hairs that she needs to pluck. I get chin hairs.
danimagoo
I started on HRT almost 20 years ago, socially transitioned almost 15 years ago, surgically transitioned almost 7 years ago, and tried both laser and electrolysis hair removal for my beard area over a two year period with very little success. I gave up on that a long time ago, and so still just shave. Ironically, considering I was unsuccessful in permanent hair removal, the hair of my beard area has always been light and slow growing, so I only have to shave every 2 or 3 days, and that’s always been true. I tried to grow a beard once very long ago when I was trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I was a man, and failed miserably. So frustrating that permanently removing it has proved impossible.
Alex
This was very interesting Wack’d, thank you for sharing.
Psychie
That was helpful, thank you. I was unaware that hermaphrodite carried the connotation of both genitalia functioning, since I knew that was impossible, but I am not super surprised at that, considering the mythological etymology (when I tried googling it to find out why it’s defunct I instead found references to an incredibly minor deity that’s the child of Hermes and Aphrodite who was just named after both of them and had both of their sexual characteristics, I am uncertain whether this is actually an ancient Greek myth or something made up in modern time since that happens a shocking amount, try looking up the story of Capricorn sometime).
I was *vaguely* aware that intersex is a catchall term for all of the various ways you can have male and female features (I’m including hormones and chromosomes under “features” along with genitals and secondary sexual characteristics) in combination, I’m don’t think my usage of both is necessarily incorrect, but it’s definitely a gross oversimplification, which is something I would have agreed to even before your post. I do think my choice to use “form” wasn’t the best word, but I just couldn’t quite come up with a better one.
I do wonder why we *don’t* have terms for all of the different kinds of intersex, though? Like, I feel like that would be much easier to define and/or categorize all of the various combinations and/or examples since it’s a relatively objective thing we can measure, whereas it kinda makes sense that there wouldn’t be a full taxonomy for gender given how much of that seems to be based upon feeling and introspection and thus potentially infinite (or at least indefinite) in how many possible “genders” there might be. Maybe it’s one of those things where there are so many possible combinations and they are all so rare that each one is like unique so giving names to all of them is pointless?
I feel like I’m about to go on another rant about the inadequacies of category theory again, so I’m gonna cut off my rambling here.
Liara
you shouldn’t include hormones in that, especially since we can alter that externally. My hormones don’t match my chromosomes, but I am not intersex, I’m simply trans and on HRT
I’d assume it’s down to something similar to the ‘churn’ you see with stuff like Psychiatric disorders through history. Medical community come up with a name for something, society picks up on it and starts misusing it, typically as an insult. Medical community is forced to come up with a new term so they can continue to discuss the issue in a respectful fashion.
Needfuldoer
Meanwhile, the people who hold negative opinions of the subjects continue fighting to wrestle currently respectful verbiage away from the common discourse so they can weaponize it to disparage “the other”. And because the wording used to discuss such things constantly changes, the negative types use the effect they’ve caused as “evidence” that “nOnE oF iT iS rEaL bEcAuSe ThEy KeEp ChAnGiNg ThE wOrDs!!1!”. That way they can continue to control the narrative as the world moves on beyond their 19th century comprehension.
Aren’t people great? /s
Yotomoe
Reminds me of the south park bit where Chef discusses the evolution of black slang and how anytime something caught on and white people started using it they had to change it to keep their own version of it, basically going from “I’m in the house.” to “Flibbidy floobidy floop”
Psychie
Yeah, this is why I’m personally against changing the words because the bigots turned the previously accepted terms into a slur, to me it feels like letting the bigots win, especially in cases where the previous term is more accurately descriptive of the disorder and the new term is inherently insulting, like the mental retardation to intellectual deficiency change. Like, I get that the connotation of the word had changed, but deficient was *already* an insult targeted at that category of people, and retardation means slowed, whereas deficient means lacking, and they aren’t *lacking*, they are just *slower* than most people, if given sufficient resources and time they could eventually learn anything the same as anyone else, the issue is that often those sufficient resources don’t exist and a sufficient amount of time is far beyond a single human lifespan, but that’s a practical limitation, not a personal one. Perhaps they could have done something with “bardus”, which a google search tells me is the ancient Greek word for slow the same way “tardus” is the Latin, I still wouldn’t have liked the change but I would have accepted it.
Hrodvitnir
It is somewhat, but as already mentioned, “hermaphrodite” has a specific meaning that most/all intersex humans are not.
No humans have both sets of fully functioning reproductive systems, however some (few) humans have a fully developed penis and vagina. In which case it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call yourself a hermaphrodite, and some people may do so.
But hermaphrodite =/= all possible intersex combinations, and obviously that intersects immediately with gender. For example, if you are XY, have a vagina, and are androgen insensitive, you will most likely be perceived as and see yourself as a woman. You are indistinguishable from a cis woman unless tested, or, unfortunately, wanting to be pregnant. But she would also be entirely correct to describe herself as intersex: a situation that has no bearing on if they actually turned out to be non-binary or male, except in that he’d get to own the transphobes with the fun fact of being XY. 😛
It’s complicated, man. We don’t need to understand it all, just respect what people want to be called.
StClair
The usual term I see for this is “euphemism treadmill”.
StClair
(this was meant as a reply to Greebs et al, above)
thejeff
It’s particularly amusing when you get organizations named after the current polite term that retain it long after it’s no longer acceptable.
See the UNCF and the NAACP.
I remember an old comic, maybe in Bloom County, highlighting how “people of color” was now preferred and “colored people” was completely unacceptable – despite being semantically equivalent. But words or phrases get used negatively and pick up bad connotations.
Psychie
I made a similar observation to myself last night in my car, while recalling conversations with my uncle who is from Tanzania. For reference, I am mostly white (I have a touch of Native American lineage on my dad’s side, but not enough to matter in any meaningful way outside of just being interesting), but my mom’s sister married this guy from Tanzania so now he’s my uncle, and was in the category of some of the darkest skin tones I’ve seen until he got old, he’s lightened up a few shades now. Or my memory is wrong, I was little and have only seen him a few times throughout my life since they all lived on the other side of the country.
Anyway, from his perspective as a man from Africa, and particularly as one who maintains dual citizenship in both Tanzania and America, he’s always been weirded out by “African-American” as the term for black people who were born and raised here, many of whom have never even *been* to Africa. He told me that if pressed he would actually pick “colored” as the most accurate descriptor, since they aren’t really “black”, as in the color, but rather various shades of brown, but he understands that there is a lot of negative history there so he mostly just uses black when referring to anyone with that skin tone, but reserves African and it’s derivatives for people like himself who are actually *from* Africa. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to speak with him since “people of color” became a thing (afaik that’s a relatively recent term, from the last half-decade or so, at least that’s when I started hearing it), but I imagine he’d both approve of it and be thoroughly amused by it, given my recollections of his attitude.
171 thoughts on “Hyde”
Ana Chronistic
Joyce: “I’m WOKE now”
Prof: “Hi Woke, hi Smoking Crater of Second-Hand Embarrassment, I’m Dad”
Clif
And since this is bring-me-to-life drawing, the model we’ll be bringing to life is …
[DRUM ROLL]
MiKE!
Just kidding, it’s really
MaryJacob.Yet_One_More_Idiot
I was putting money on the model being Dorothy. To really blow Joyce’s mind about her sexuality. xD
deliverything
Well, she’s been helping Joyce with everything else about this life drawing class, so why not this too?
Morleuca
I was thinking maybe the originally planned model doesn’t show up and the professor presses Joe into service. Who is so non-plussed he ends up going along with it. Joyce’s head might explode however.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
That is…an extremely plausible plot “twist”. 🙂
Wack'd
joyce wanted to call them interhankypanky, didn’t she
Doctor_Who
She had to do a quick glance around the room and brace herself in case her grandmother jumped out from somewhere and went “A-HA!” the moment she said sex.
Yes, that’s a little extreme even for Joyce, but she was half expecting Chris Hansen last strip.
The Wellerman
She’s trying!!! Hooray!!! ?
Also, devilishly delightful choice for the 13th book title, thank you Willis!!! ✌️?
Bicycle Bill
Which one – Joyce saying “I’ve taken gender studies – I’m liberal now” or Joe’s remark about “a smoking crater of second-hand embarrassment”? Either one would be great!
Juanoku
Check the alt text
Bicycle Bill
The effects of getting old… I keep forgetting about that.
shadowcell
Dumbing of Age Book 13: I’m a Second-Hand Cra–oh
anonymsly
Biggest clue that Joyce is nervous: the never-ending flood of words.
Joe, you have my respect for not just walking away and standing in a corner Blair Witch style.
C.T. Phipps
Professor: You know this class isn’t all about painting nude forms, right?
Joyce: …what?
*leaves*
Stephen Bierce
I’ve got Nothing To Hyde…
Stephen Bierce
Oddly Appropriate AND Inappropriate at the same time! Same backup singers as Steve Martin’s in Little Shop of Horrors if you can believe it.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
But plenty to Jekyll…
Wait, what? xD
Wack'd
i don’t want to start listing genders because if we start listing them then we’re gonna be here all day talking about them, drawing diagrams with straws
Psychie
They weren’t listing genders, they were listing sexes, you can have a male form, a female form, or both, the currently acceptable term for having both is intersex, it used to be hermaphrodite, if you’re familiar with that, but apparently that’s offensive now? I don’t know why, since when I found out the individual who took it upon themselves to explain decided to be condescending instead of helpful.
BarerMender
There are also rare people with no sex at all. No repro organs, no interest, no evident gender. People seem to oscillate at random between male and female pronouns when speaking of them. I don’t know what they’re called.
Feathers
Asexu– wait no
Feathers
(This isn’t intended to be poking fun at ace people, I’m ace; it’s just poking fun at the English language I guess)
BarerMender
I would guess “sexless.”
Subjektivity
As far as I’ve currently seen studying medicine, I don’t think complete absence of sex characteristics is possible. when I searched through the NIH database for conditions associated with the absence of sex characteristics, I couldn’t find whatever condition you are referencing. Any idea what it’s called?
BarerMender
There was a person interviewed on TV some years ago who had no sex characteristics. The person was named Toby. They said they had folds like a woman but no vagina and no internal generative organs. That’s all I know.
Taffy
Got curious and looked that up. (I’m assuming this is it.)
Hell of a quote here: “I did not choose to exist. Finding that I exist, I determined it’s a good thing that I exist. I like being who I am. Why should I try to be anybody else?”
Subjektivity
Ah cool…. sounds like MRKH syndrome. Granted I don’t watch talkshows… but tonally that sounded more like an interview. Was that really just a daytime talk show?
Wack'd
alright so let me break it down for you
“sex” is a combination of what genitals you got between your legs, what chromosomes you got, and what your hormones are doing. many people with penises get one set of chromosomes and hormones and are generally regarded as having a “male” sex. many people with vaginas get one set of chromosomes and hormones and are generally regarded as having a “female” sex. if you’re intersex, you don’t have both, you have some sort of combination of hormones, chromosomes, and genitals that are considered atypical, and there are dozens upon hundreds of ways that can manifest. a lotta times you end up with a between-the-legs genital that doesn’t quite conform to what a penis or a vagina typically looks like. we don’t use “hermaphrodite” anymore because that means you have a functioning penis and a functioning vagina, which–last i checked–medical consensus says isn’t a thing that happens to human beings, even intersex ones
what all this means is “sex” is kind of an incoherent way to talk about people. folks you might presume are male might have some slight factor off from the norm, same with folks you might presume are female. bodies can look lots of different ways, and you can’t actually tell just by looking the sum total of a person’s anatomy. so, like, why use it?
and i guess the answer is, as per my joke: there are a fuckton of genders. (gender might actually be biological! everything you think and feel about yourself is a sum total of hormones and chemicals and your brain meats, why should gender be any different?) it’s hard to list all of them. it’s easy to fall back to “sex”, which at a glance seems much easier to reduce to a neat little pile, but is actually, as i’ve explained, messy and complicated
i hope this helped
Yotomoe
It’s probably rude to say but I feel like this is moreso an issue depending on how charitable the listener is willing to be to the speaker. Like if you’re using the terminology for simplicity’s sake you can usually say “ok I get what they mean by this without requiring them to be incredibly specific about what they’re talking about” Because Sex is nebulous, Gender is literally impossible to understand without asking someone and they might not even know. And then you run the risk of spending whatever time you were gonna spend saying what you were gonna say to now trying to define what EXACTLY you mean and it just sorta makes the conversation switch subjects.
I dunno. I’m receptive but at the same time I do find it a little frustrating to have to broach any topic of the human body super carefully because my ape brain is designed to want to categorize things while socially we want to make so many categories to refer to being that it’s impossible to do the former easily.
deliverything
To add to this: the current strip depicts Hyde, Joe and Joyce. Just by looking, most people would assume Joyce is female while the other two are male. But… we can’t see their hormones, their chromosomes or their genitals (without looking on Slipshine, at least). Granted, there are some aspects we can see which are usually indicative, but they’re not always reliable.
eh, whatever
Two of them have beards, so that tells us something about their current hormone levels – whether self-produced or taken as medicine. That’s probably all, though.
Sterling
Not necessarily! As a recent (as in sub 1 yr) hrt patient, I can confirm that despite having low t and a nice high intake of e, not only could I still eventually grow a beard but if I had gone without shaving since beginning hormones the facial hair I had beforehand would not have thinned much. You can have female hormone levels and a beard. Most cis women shave their faces as well, btw.
Taffy
So, do most cis women just also lie about not shaving their faces, then? Because I’ve never met one who’s brought it up even once, even during conversations where it would be relevant. Usually they’ll just say something to the tune of “I’m glad I don’t need to do that”. I just wanna know where you’re getting “most” from.
Ana Chronistic
It’s not DAILY, but sometimes my peach fuzz is just thick enough I have to get rid of it
People with light hair may be able to have exactly the same amount and not have it be visible except up close
Liquid Len
AFAIK, there are a few ways cis women deal with facial hair, usually by plucking, shaving, or bleaching. Kinda depends on how dark and thick the hair is. Hormone levels (think menopause) can alter this as well over a lifetime.
Taffy
Oh, I know about all those things (I’m not completely ignorant and oblivious to life, after all), I’m just raising an eyebrow at the use of “most”, when that goes against my own lived experience of cis women basically bragging that they don’t need to worry about face fuzz aside from the occasional eyebrow plucking. Not saying it never happens.
thejeff
I think it’s more common with age. It’s also very much dependent on ethnicity.
Might be very common in some areas and rare in others due to that.
Joy
It’s possible that they’re… Lying…?
Taffy
Like, I guess? But I try to steer clear of that whole “women are constantly lying” misogyny trope, so I’ll usually default to just believing what I’m told and assuming the person talking is being truthful. That said, I do understand that there’s about a billion societal bullshitteries that would maybe motivate that sort of lie.
Sterling
Well, I suppose to say that most shave is not provably correct- but an amount of very light/fine hair on the upper lip to chin region is something you can probably find if you are simply close up enough to a woman to see. It is something that some ladies will conceal due to social pressure, and tbh I would say is rude to ask about or mention in the same way it is rude to ask about or mention a trans woman’s facial hairs. I first noticed it on my mother as a child and have consistently noticed it on cisfem sexual and romantic partners throughout my life. Not universally, but often enough to make my trans ass feel way less dysphoric about having hair in general.
Twitcher
My sister gets lip hairs that she needs to pluck. I get chin hairs.
danimagoo
I started on HRT almost 20 years ago, socially transitioned almost 15 years ago, surgically transitioned almost 7 years ago, and tried both laser and electrolysis hair removal for my beard area over a two year period with very little success. I gave up on that a long time ago, and so still just shave. Ironically, considering I was unsuccessful in permanent hair removal, the hair of my beard area has always been light and slow growing, so I only have to shave every 2 or 3 days, and that’s always been true. I tried to grow a beard once very long ago when I was trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I was a man, and failed miserably. So frustrating that permanently removing it has proved impossible.
Alex
This was very interesting Wack’d, thank you for sharing.
Psychie
That was helpful, thank you. I was unaware that hermaphrodite carried the connotation of both genitalia functioning, since I knew that was impossible, but I am not super surprised at that, considering the mythological etymology (when I tried googling it to find out why it’s defunct I instead found references to an incredibly minor deity that’s the child of Hermes and Aphrodite who was just named after both of them and had both of their sexual characteristics, I am uncertain whether this is actually an ancient Greek myth or something made up in modern time since that happens a shocking amount, try looking up the story of Capricorn sometime).
I was *vaguely* aware that intersex is a catchall term for all of the various ways you can have male and female features (I’m including hormones and chromosomes under “features” along with genitals and secondary sexual characteristics) in combination, I’m don’t think my usage of both is necessarily incorrect, but it’s definitely a gross oversimplification, which is something I would have agreed to even before your post. I do think my choice to use “form” wasn’t the best word, but I just couldn’t quite come up with a better one.
I do wonder why we *don’t* have terms for all of the different kinds of intersex, though? Like, I feel like that would be much easier to define and/or categorize all of the various combinations and/or examples since it’s a relatively objective thing we can measure, whereas it kinda makes sense that there wouldn’t be a full taxonomy for gender given how much of that seems to be based upon feeling and introspection and thus potentially infinite (or at least indefinite) in how many possible “genders” there might be. Maybe it’s one of those things where there are so many possible combinations and they are all so rare that each one is like unique so giving names to all of them is pointless?
I feel like I’m about to go on another rant about the inadequacies of category theory again, so I’m gonna cut off my rambling here.
Liara
you shouldn’t include hormones in that, especially since we can alter that externally. My hormones don’t match my chromosomes, but I am not intersex, I’m simply trans and on HRT
Greebs
I’d assume it’s down to something similar to the ‘churn’ you see with stuff like Psychiatric disorders through history. Medical community come up with a name for something, society picks up on it and starts misusing it, typically as an insult. Medical community is forced to come up with a new term so they can continue to discuss the issue in a respectful fashion.
Needfuldoer
Meanwhile, the people who hold negative opinions of the subjects continue fighting to wrestle currently respectful verbiage away from the common discourse so they can weaponize it to disparage “the other”. And because the wording used to discuss such things constantly changes, the negative types use the effect they’ve caused as “evidence” that “nOnE oF iT iS rEaL bEcAuSe ThEy KeEp ChAnGiNg ThE wOrDs!!1!”. That way they can continue to control the narrative as the world moves on beyond their 19th century comprehension.
Aren’t people great? /s
Yotomoe
Reminds me of the south park bit where Chef discusses the evolution of black slang and how anytime something caught on and white people started using it they had to change it to keep their own version of it, basically going from “I’m in the house.” to “Flibbidy floobidy floop”
Psychie
Yeah, this is why I’m personally against changing the words because the bigots turned the previously accepted terms into a slur, to me it feels like letting the bigots win, especially in cases where the previous term is more accurately descriptive of the disorder and the new term is inherently insulting, like the mental retardation to intellectual deficiency change. Like, I get that the connotation of the word had changed, but deficient was *already* an insult targeted at that category of people, and retardation means slowed, whereas deficient means lacking, and they aren’t *lacking*, they are just *slower* than most people, if given sufficient resources and time they could eventually learn anything the same as anyone else, the issue is that often those sufficient resources don’t exist and a sufficient amount of time is far beyond a single human lifespan, but that’s a practical limitation, not a personal one. Perhaps they could have done something with “bardus”, which a google search tells me is the ancient Greek word for slow the same way “tardus” is the Latin, I still wouldn’t have liked the change but I would have accepted it.
Hrodvitnir
It is somewhat, but as already mentioned, “hermaphrodite” has a specific meaning that most/all intersex humans are not.
No humans have both sets of fully functioning reproductive systems, however some (few) humans have a fully developed penis and vagina. In which case it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call yourself a hermaphrodite, and some people may do so.
But hermaphrodite =/= all possible intersex combinations, and obviously that intersects immediately with gender. For example, if you are XY, have a vagina, and are androgen insensitive, you will most likely be perceived as and see yourself as a woman. You are indistinguishable from a cis woman unless tested, or, unfortunately, wanting to be pregnant. But she would also be entirely correct to describe herself as intersex: a situation that has no bearing on if they actually turned out to be non-binary or male, except in that he’d get to own the transphobes with the fun fact of being XY. 😛
It’s complicated, man. We don’t need to understand it all, just respect what people want to be called.
StClair
The usual term I see for this is “euphemism treadmill”.
StClair
(this was meant as a reply to Greebs et al, above)
thejeff
It’s particularly amusing when you get organizations named after the current polite term that retain it long after it’s no longer acceptable.
See the UNCF and the NAACP.
I remember an old comic, maybe in Bloom County, highlighting how “people of color” was now preferred and “colored people” was completely unacceptable – despite being semantically equivalent. But words or phrases get used negatively and pick up bad connotations.
Psychie
I made a similar observation to myself last night in my car, while recalling conversations with my uncle who is from Tanzania. For reference, I am mostly white (I have a touch of Native American lineage on my dad’s side, but not enough to matter in any meaningful way outside of just being interesting), but my mom’s sister married this guy from Tanzania so now he’s my uncle, and was in the category of some of the darkest skin tones I’ve seen until he got old, he’s lightened up a few shades now. Or my memory is wrong, I was little and have only seen him a few times throughout my life since they all lived on the other side of the country.
Anyway, from his perspective as a man from Africa, and particularly as one who maintains dual citizenship in both Tanzania and America, he’s always been weirded out by “African-American” as the term for black people who were born and raised here, many of whom have never even *been* to Africa. He told me that if pressed he would actually pick “colored” as the most accurate descriptor, since they aren’t really “black”, as in the color, but rather various shades of brown, but he understands that there is a lot of negative history there so he mostly just uses black when referring to anyone with that skin tone, but reserves African and it’s derivatives for people like himself who are actually *from* Africa. Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to speak with him since “people of color” became a thing (afaik that’s a relatively recent term, from the last half-decade or so, at least that’s when I started hearing it), but I imagine he’d both approve of it and be thoroughly amused by it, given my recollections of his attitude.
Suet
Dr. Jekyll? Get the barrel.
Joyce has finger guns now.
The Wellerman
I should make a twin-stick shooter with Joyce’s finger guns!!!! ?
Puppeteer Nessus
Liberals favor finger-gun control, though
Chaucer59
As a proud Liberal I can state emphatically that I have no interest in controlling finger guns.
Reltzik
He’s one of those informal professors that goes by “Dr. Firstname”. His real name is Hyde O’Hare.
Ana Chronistic
Not Hyde Ensikh?
ButWhyASpoon
Joyce: “Hello fellow Liberals! All my friends are Heathens!”
Joe: “Take it slow.”
not someone else
Reference gotten.
Nono
Joe’s smoking, alright.
AeromechanicalAce
I am totally stealing Joe’s line in the final panel. I too have been a smoking crater of second-hand embarrassment.
Yeet
relating to joe so much right now
good god joyce how do you do anything without dying of anxiety
Nono
She had Becky to be distraction from her anxieties.
The Wellerman
She should play more video games! They’re really good for distraction!! ☺️
Especially if she plays the Totally Evil Satanic kind. ?
alongcameaspider
Makes Me wonder how she’d react to The Binding of Isaac, pre or post Athiest
Freezer
I think Joyce would totally fall in love with a game like Animal Crossing.
…Right up until one of the villagers decided to leave or asked her to get rid of another villager.
Stardew Valley then? You can play for years (literally) and not learn jack shit about your neighbors.
Needfuldoer
Yammering to distract / vent the anxiety.
Kravis
“I am Joyce’s complete lack of social interaction knowledge and skills, but you can call me Joe.”
K. Ivan Ruppert